Kunstler Remembrance A Reminder Of Activism

November 06, 1995|By Pamela Cytrynbaum, Tribune Staff Writer.

They came from around the city and the nation to remember "the Clarence Darrow of the late 20th Century." Not as noisy or as young anymore-but no less determined-some of the most well-known activists of the 1960s reunited Sunday to remind each other of a time and a man now gone.

William Kunstler, who died of a heart attack in September at the age of 76, was remembered by those he worked with, bailed out, rallied for and passionately defended as an "attorney for the damned."

In an auditorium at the University of Illinois at Chicago, more than 350 lawyers, students, activists and the just plain curious heard loving recollections from former headline acts in Kunstler's theater of outrage.

"It's strange to see us all together, isn't it?" asked Adam Bourgeois, a Chicago attorney who defended Vietnam War protesters with Kunstler.

There was Bobby Rush, former Black Panther-turned U.S. congressman; David Dellinger, one of the Chicago 7 defendants represented by Kunstler; Bernardine Dohrn, a leader of the Weather Underground and once one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted, now director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Legal Clinic of Northwestern University's Law School; and H. Rap Brown, former head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, now a grocery-health store owner in Atlanta named Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.

"Bill was the '60s," Dohrn said of her wild-haired colleague and friend of 27 years.

Kunstler, she said, was "the attorney for the damned." Dohrn spent 11 years underground hiding out after the Weathermen turned to bombings, robberies and murder in their war protests.

"He was a lawyer in spite of the law," Al-Amin said. "He immersed himself in it. He didn't hold back."

"If Bill were here, I think what he would say is, `Don't mourn. Organize!' " Dellinger told the crowd, full of bearded, braided middle-age folks with a few very young and very old mixed in.

Dellinger went on to urge the crowd to protest at the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago if cause celebre Peltier isn't freed from jail. Peltier is serving two life sentences for fatally shooting two FBI agents on an Indian reservation in 1975. Activists consider Peltier, who says he did not fire the fatal shots, a political prisoner.

"Bill was one of the first lawyers we called when we were surrounded by all four branches of the armed forces at Wounded Knee," recalled Clyde Bellecourt, founder and national director of the American Indian Movement. "I was facing 200 years in prison, plus two life sentences."

Not only did Kunstler passionately defend his clients, he befriended them. "He participated in all our ceremonies, our purification ceremony, the sweat lodge," Bellecourt said. "We gave him an Indian name, Soaring Eagle."

Said Dohrn: "Bill rejected the professional distancing between lawyer and client. His clients became lifelong friends."

And though Kunstler's critics called him a showboat, a media manipulator and a publicity seeker, there were apparently no critics in Sunday's crowd, only those still devoted to the cause, to following the man Dohrn called "the Clarence Darrow of the late 20th Century."

"To be heard, sometimes you have to shout," said Edward Stein, a Chicago civil rights lawyer and Kunstler friend who helped to organize the gathering. "When there are people dying, when there's oppression, you have to shout. And you have to remember what he did. He may have been noisy. He may have embarrassed people, but he did so in the confines of the system. He did so in the courtroom, the absolutely perfect way to deal with the enemy, to defeat them in the courtroom, in the voting booths."

Rush urged the crowd to reinvigorate activism. "Our movement has been torn asunder," he said, "by both external and internal forces."

Hope may have come in the form of a 32-year-old Chicago public school teacher named Craig Segal, who listened with his 2-year-old son, Nicolas, in the back of the room. "The movement's not dead," Segal said. "It's very much alive. You should have seen us when Newt (Gingrich) was in town. Did you read about the protesters who got arrested? That was me."

Stein said he was heartened to see so many people come out to honor his friend, especially during a time when liberalism is much maligned.

"We're still around," he said of the old activists, many now working within the system they so detested. "But we're in a tactical retreat. There's a cycle. We're headed for a rebirth."